Tag: Genre

Imagine you are in a room and you don’t know why you are there. The doors are locked and it seems there is no way out except to solve ridiculously hard puzzles and scrounge for clues that can easily be overlooked. It can take several hours to escape and once you finally do there is no conclusion to this story or explanation to why you were put in the room in the first place, it just fades into whiteness.

While that might not sound enjoyable to you, games like that happen to be one of my favorite types of games to play and I’m not alone.… Read the rest

One of the most anticipated videogames to be released in several years was Destiny. Developed by Bungie, the studio that originally created the Halo franchise (though the Halo team split off several years ago and formed 343 Industries), and published by Activision, Destiny was awaited with eager, clamoring impatience by the world’s gaming community, but after its release the eagerness and excitement turned to frank disappointment, and even outrage. The perceived failings of Destiny have been discussed, theorized and argued about ever since, but even though it may be difficult to discuss the game at all without at least touching upon the game’s controversies, that is not the subject of this article.… Read the rest

When you read the words “post-apocalypse”, or “dystopia”, you probably form a mental image of a gritty, war-torn universe, where the only thing sadder than the environment are the people inside of it. Most games in this genre fit that description, including recent titles like The Last of Us. However, there is one game that breaks free of the stereotype and is still considered a post-apocalyptic shooter.

Sunset Overdrive is a first-person shooter that takes place in a dystopian city, where the consumers of a drink called Overcharge (manufactured by the “Big Brother” company, FizzCo) are turned into grotesque mutants called OD.… Read the rest

The games industry is, as its name implies, an industry—built upon a standard funding and revenue cycle one would expect from any industry. Video games have been the subject of business, mass-marketing and profiteering since their inception. Only until recently, however, there was a clear line between the game and the business. Money was spent to play the game, of course, but the act of playing the game was divorced from the act of spending money on it. One might have had to scrape together the cash to purchase Super Mario Bros. but, once the game started, the player would be far more concerned with mushrooms and turtles than the money that had been spent for the privilege.… Read the rest